[HN Gopher] Tiny World Map
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Tiny World Map
Author : bopjesvla
Score : 331 points
Date : 2024-04-21 11:21 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| thriftwy wrote:
| I woule adjust city density based on surroundings. I remember
| getting lost in Maps.me while in northern Russia: zooming out
| will not display any tiny villages of the area whereas zooming in
| will not place any of those on the screen. So you got a blank
| slate.
|
| Meanwhile, displaying every suburb of a metropolis possessing a
| town status may be superfluous.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Interesting comment. I guess it should be optimised for density
| uniformity somehow.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's the way to do it. You get the map area, divide it by a
| constant and get the number of stuff your map should display.
| Then it's a matter of getting the largest-n stuff from the
| database.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| You can always zoom to a level such that there's nothing there.
| And if all that _is_ there is a few small villages, then
| "nothing there" isn't far of the mark anyway.
|
| If you include smaller cities to 'fill in blank spaces', then
| either:
|
| a) You'd have to drop a bigger city/suburb elsewhere. Not
| display a 1M town to be able to display a 10k town in thinly
| populated area elsewhere? Hmmm...
|
| b) Or the app get bigger. Which defeats the purpose of having a
| tiny world map.
|
| Want more detail? Just use some other app.
| msephton wrote:
| I was unable to find Easter Island.
| xioxox wrote:
| Yes, many of the islands are missing even if they have labels
| (e.g. Faroe Islands). It would be nice if there was just a blob
| there at least.
| msephton wrote:
| Agreed. I get that there has to be a trade off between size
| and coverage, but if it's a map it should really have the
| option - at least - for the person implement it to choose
| density. Personally, I'd want every island to be at least
| shown as a blob.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The label is a blob.
| rob74 wrote:
| I noticed the islands too (apparently only islands above a
| certain size "qualify" - of the Canary Islands you only get
| Gran Canaria and Tenerife, of the Galapagos Islands only
| Isabela, of the Azores - nothing), but all European
| "microstates"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_microstates) are also
| not shown, some of them (Liechtenstein, San Marino) not even
| as labels.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| high compression is usually lossy
| playingalong wrote:
| At least there is New Zealand.
| sodimel wrote:
| Really cool project!
| keepamovin wrote:
| This is SOO Good! Thank you for making this.
|
| Just as an idea: I think your demo should include an optional
| "Locate Me" button that requests geolocation perms and prints the
| lat long point on the map.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Great product. Would be awesome if you could generate a smaller
| version depending on which part of the world you are biased
| towards.
| rozab wrote:
| This is cool, but the shorelines are very low detail. A few towns
| in the UK are off in the sea, meanwhile Greenland and Northern
| Canada are hogging all the vertices.
|
| It looks as though the Mercator projection is already being
| accounted for in the detail level, but it would be good to
| deprioritize unpopulated areas.
| nolok wrote:
| This notably lead to making it not very usable at all in
| islands or achipelago area. Even the philippines, with a lots
| of islands sure but several ones of them being rather large, is
| not usable.
|
| French polynesia doesn't even exists on the map.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Neither is Saint Pierre et Miquelon. There is the island of
| la Reunion but no name, and the name for Ibiza but no
| island...
|
| I hope those can be fixed, I love the concept.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > A few towns in the UK are off in the sea
|
| And some, notably Manchester, are entirely absent.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > And some, notably Manchester, are entirely absent.
|
| But Wrexham is shown - so the priorities seem correct. ;-)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrexham_A.F.C.#2020%E2%80%9
| 3pr...
| ta1243 wrote:
| Developer is clearly from Liverpool :D
|
| It's odd - they've got places like Stockport, Salford, Oldham
| etc, just not Manchester. Manchester has the highest
| population of the boroughs in Greater Manchester
| dansky wrote:
| Nice project! It may be useful to select the included places
| also by QRank of Wikidata [1] so notable islands will appear,
| despite low populations. An SQLite DB of QRank [2] was also
| posted here in HN a while ago.
|
| [1] https://qrank.wmcloud.org/ [2]
| https://github.com/hikeratlas/qrank
| Aachen wrote:
| (Saving people a click for link#1: qrank sorts Wikidata
| entries by their pageviews across Wikipedia, Wikiquotes,
| Wikibooks, etc.)
|
| I'm not sure that an online popularity contest should be the
| input for a base map. I understand the reasoning that they're
| more likely to be viewed by someone, but it's also a bubble:
| is Wikipedia / are Wikimedia projects as popular in Asia as
| this base map will be? Is that used for the same purpose as
| this base map? Should something be shown on a map when
| there's a lot of drama about it rather than because a lot of
| people live there?
|
| I see the advantages also, like if literally nobody lives
| there but it's an interesting or large landmass then there's
| cause for it to be included. I just don't think this is the
| right (objective, fairest) importance measure to use
| perrygeo wrote:
| The simplification was sloppy all around. Entire nations are
| missing in the Caribbean. These are basic quality control
| checks.
| s0rce wrote:
| Same with the Alaska Panhandle, lots of uninhabited complex
| shoreline.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| There also seem to be some bugs in this, just look at Hamburg,
| Germany...
| Aachen wrote:
| The ratio/prioritisation of detail in cities to shorelines
| seems oddly skewed towards including more cities over having
| accurate borders or shorelines
|
| It's showing an entire province in the Netherlands as
| disconnected from the rest of the country, like it's an island
| (it's not), but knows to name five cities inside of that
| province, several of which basically on top of each other. (The
| inclusion of the _afsluitdijk_ , on the other hand, is
| unnecessary detail imo but I get that it's hard to
| programmatically select those tweaks about what's considered
| land which it needs to draw and just some sea infrastructure)
|
| I should open a ticket on the issue tracker but am not logged
| in on mobile so the best I can do atm is an HN comment. If
| someone else has a moment and feels the same way, feel free to
| cite this comment towards shifting the ratio a little! Or
| introducing a minimum separation distance between cities, or
| getting a smaller overall file, whatever the ideal solution may
| be but the current ratio is a tad unnecessary
| danparsonson wrote:
| This is really nice although I'm finding the progressive loading
| a bit unreliable - sometimes tiles don't display if I zoom and
| pan quickly at the same time. I'm using FF 125.0 on Android.
| _ache_ wrote:
| I made the same (offline first, very small, vector based) but
| with a focus on i18n. So it's available in all languages of the
| United Nation (except Spanish because I just forgot, shame on me,
| could be made in a couple of hours).
|
| The name of the countries (and cities) are the official one
| declared at the UN. So, yeah, the official short version of UK is
| "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
|
| https://map.ache.one/en
| barlog wrote:
| Fabulous.
|
| I read your rail ads story with interest.
|
| Great perspective.
|
| Su Qing rashiiShi Dian deshita from ja-JP
| _ache_ wrote:
| Thank you very much. How lovely.
| gascoigne wrote:
| Oh thank you for pointing this out!! I loved watching the ads
| and reading _ache_'s commentary. Wonderful work.
|
| https://ache.one/articles/rail-and-advertising for the
| interested.
| idoubtit wrote:
| That's nice, but quite buggy. "Cape town" appears in South
| Sudan, though the country is not named. Erythrea is also
| missing its name. And there are 2 Somalia blocks, with
| different colors.
|
| My own experience is that it's rather easy to draw a light map
| and deal with i18n. There are several open data sources and
| libraries. The hard problem is purely administrative. If you
| have data tied to most countries, there's certainly a mismatch
| with your source for a map, and you have to build a custom map
| yourself.
|
| There is no consensus on what a country is. A few examples of
| divergences: Western Sahara is officially a country, but
| practically it's always been occupied by Morocco. Somalia is a
| mess, with Somaliland and Puntland being de facto independant
| coutries though noone acknoledge them officially. Between these
| two categories, Greenland, Nue and a few others are not fully
| independant.
| konstantinua00 wrote:
| "i18n" is very not internationalized abbreviation...
| keraf wrote:
| Not sure if the star is supposed to indicate the biggest city
| or the capital, but if it's the latter, Tanzania has it wrong.
| The star is on Dar Es Salaam but the label over it says Dodoma,
| which is the name of the actual capital but it's more in the
| center of the country.
| _ache_ wrote:
| It's very good !
|
| - Get the islands back !
|
| - Limit the zoom level to not pass through the land
|
| - Make the Capital city maybe in light bold or slightly bigger to
| differentiate them
|
| - Fix long name
|
| - Some cities disappear when you zoom.
| yosito wrote:
| This is cute, and I can imagine there are some use cases for it.
| But I was disappointed to find out that it doesn't even have the
| 150km2 island that I live on. Maybe a bit too small for most
| cases.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| It's funny that it doesn't have the great lakes. I guess it
| doesn't have any internal bodies of water.
| zekrioca wrote:
| Interesting project! Would it be possible to add other types of
| boundaries?
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| Interesting that some relatively recent changes of preferred
| names like Czech Republic->Czechia and Macedonia->North Macedonia
| are on there but not Turkey->Turkiye and East Timor->Timor-Leste.
| nakedrobot2 wrote:
| Considering the coarseness of the borders, I am very surprised
| this takes up as much space as it does. It seems like the total
| data size is well under the threshold of utility vs. filesize. If
| it were double the size, the borders wouldn't be so janky, for
| example.
| Aachen wrote:
| The full file is some 700K without gzip compression
|
| > all the data present in the complete version except for
| country borders and shorelines. This reduces [the size] by 200k
|
| So about 29% is border/shore data, 71% is city names and
| locations
|
| Imo a lot of cities could be dropped, especially when they're
| on top of each other (not visible until you've zoomed in so far
| to see a grey landmass and that city name) to make the
| shorelines more accurate
|
| I'm also not sure how often a general location on a world map
| is needed. Wouldn't one more often want a low-KB map of the
| surrounding highways and transit lines one can use to reach the
| POI whose website you're currently looking at, for example? A
| version for every few km2 on the planet could be built and you
| could have quite a lot of useful detail at a tenth of the size.
| Global low poly also has its purposes, like tracking the space
| station I guess, but it seems much rarer
| diamnom wrote:
| This should really include capitals even if they are smaller than
| 40k and star them in some way
| xipho wrote:
| Very cool. I've long wanted to make an 8-bit throwback style
| "species page", think an EOL or wiki-page, or our own TaxonPages
| effort (example at
| https://orthoptera.speciesfile.org/otus/850075/overview). I'd
| like to see how much (symbolic) information you could pack into
| simplified figures etc, this would fit right in to answer the
| question "where in the world can I find the species, roughly".
| shadowpho wrote:
| Wow the large file is <1MB, that's efficient
| teo_zero wrote:
| Is there a reason why New Dehli doesn't show up at any zoom
| level?
| pentagrama wrote:
| This runs really smoothly on my midrange phone. On the GitHub
| page it doesn't mention if there is translated versions, I will
| consider it if there is a version in Spanish.
| jimmyrocks wrote:
| This is really cool! I'm super impressed at how quickly it loads
| on my phone.
|
| Really great idea to compress the spatial data into Paths.
|
| I would suggest using Natural Earth data instead of OSM so you
| could drop the ODbL license.
|
| It'd also be really cool if you included the tool that converts
| the spatial data into Paths.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Those 2 banners about usage are so prominent and distracting
| without the option to hide them. It makes it unusable for me.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Love the service worker idea. What other things could service
| workers do with maps?
| BodyCulture wrote:
| Lots of errors, why does this exist? What is the use case for a
| map without precision?
| echoangle wrote:
| That's stated in the description. As a fallback and when you
| only need general location.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I think I love the idea - solve the problem of "you zoomed out
| too far, now wait for the server to load tiles for the continent
| you just asked to be rendered" - but I'm not sure what the use
| cases are where I need to know where West Bloomfield Township is
| in relationship to Waterford Charter Township (both suburbs of
| Detroit) but not what state they're in or even that the _Great
| Lakes_ exist.
|
| I would like to see a lot more data put into coastlines and a lot
| less into subdividing major metropolitan areas.
| jokoon wrote:
| seems a bit weird to use a service worker to do an offline
| version... the tutorial linked is long and worthless if you want
| people to quickly install and use it, you need to either make a
| shorter more concise tutorial.
|
| imagine somebody loses internet access, he can't really open this
| thing to just access a map, I don't understand.
|
| why not just provide a html file with the tiles encoded as base64
| or something similar? just provide a zip file... I am not a web
| developer, this seems like a good thing, but deployment is
| 1/10... minimalist things are supposed to be very easy to deploy.
|
| EDIT: just saving the page, and it works. I don't understand what
| the service workers are for. web dev has mysterious ways.
| likeclockwork wrote:
| That's what service workers are for.
|
| This service worker explicitly caches all the resources the app
| needs to run then intercepts requests for those resources so
| all the JS that depends on the resources still runs while
| you're offline.
|
| If you had visited the site in the past, even if you were
| offline you would be able to go to that URL and the service
| worker would serve everything needed from cache.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I think I would have personally liked to have seen less small
| towns, and more major roads.
| NeoTar wrote:
| I was interested to learn that the 10.000 largest settlements in
| the world gets you get down to 48.000 population. I'm still
| trying to work out if that is a surprising figure or not.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I think there's a flaw in this idea.
|
| > By default, the map displays the 10,000 most populous cities
| added to OpenStreetMap. At the time of writing, this encompasses
| all cities and towns with a population of at least 48,000:
|
| Statistically speaking, if you're closer to or even in those
| cities, you are more likely to have access to better network
| quality and speed. It's when you're in the more remote areas (or
| not near a population centre of 48,000 people...) that this
| project would be more useful.
|
| If this map is only 300KB zipped and as it mentions offline-
| first, then surely a 1MB version would get you even better
| fidelity and more remote locations?
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